SHARING TRAINING RESOURCES … A Success Story:
TRAINING
A cooperative training effort involving a local fire department and an insurance company bridges the gap between insurance engineers who lack actual fire experience and fire fighters who can benefit from more knowledge of fixed fire protection equipment.
Senior Instructor
Maximizing available resources is a must in today’s tight economy. Unfortunately, many valuable resources often go untapped because of failures to explore new avenues. One of these largely unexplored avenues is that of cooperative training programs.
A unique cooperative program that has proven very successful is one instituted by Industrial Risk Insurers (IRI) and the Wallingford, Conn., Fire Department, a combination career/volunteer department.
IRI is a capital stock property insurance organization that employs several hundred fire insurance engineers and fire protection representatives worldwide. These people visit insured facilities and conduct surveys to evaluate fire protection for insurance purposes. One of the key tasks of these people is to identity inadequacies in all facets of private fire protection and to make the necessary recommendations to have these deficiencies improved.
To train new field people, who are usually engineering graduates, in all facets of loss prevention, IRI relies on a comprehensive 22-week on-the-job training program supplemented by two-week basic and two-week advanced segments conducted at the IRI s Fire Safety Laboratory in Hartford, Conn.
The IRI s Fire Safety Laboratory, in existence since 1947, was established to provide a training facility where the then Factory Insurance Associaton field engineers could see the state of the art in fixed fire protection equipment. The lab was also Opened to others in the fire protection field by offering a one-week course entitled “Fundamentals of Industrial Fire Protection Equipment Since its establishment as the first facility of its type in the United States, both the laboratory and the one-week course have become well known by the fire protection community.
The two-week basic lab session for IRI employees and the one-week course for outsiders shared the same basic objectives—to acquaint students with the fundamentals of industrial fire protection. The only portion of the program that was lacking was the experience of a class A structural fire. Since many of the outsiders who attended sessions had backgrounds in the municipal fire service or plant fire brigades, they had this experience. But, for IRI trainees, this experience was usually wanting.
—photos by Mike Callan.
Without any practical fire fighting experience, the IRI fire protection representatives often found it difficult to relate to plant personnel with fire fighting experience
In 1981, IRI and the Wallingford Fire Department agreed to cooperate in their training efforts. The Wallingford Fire Department would make its training facility, equipment and instructional personnel available to provide a training session in structural fire fighting. In return, IRI would waive its registration for any fire fighters or fire officers of the Wallingford department.
In November of that same year, the pilot test of a four-hour introduction to structural fire fighting was conducted at the Wallingford facility. The objectives of this session were to familiarize students with fire fighters’ protective clothing; SCBA; the operation of 1½, 1¾ and 2½-inch hose lines; fire development within a structure; the value of ventilation as an aid to interior fire fighting; the fire environment; and the direct and indirect methods of fire attack.
Lesson plans for the four-hour awareness program were developed and submitted to the Connecticut Commission on Fire Prevention and Control so that the session would be state approved and students could receive state certificates for their training. Paul Stewart, IRI manager of training and education attended the pilot test as a student. Since the pilot test, all IRI engineering trainees have attended similar sessions.
A fast-paced slide/tape program developed in Connecticut and custom-tailored by the Wallingford Fire Department sets the stage for the training sessions by giving students a brief overview of the fire service and its role in fire protection.
Students then are introduced to fire fighters’ protective clothing, with a brief history of turnout gear including examples and an explanation of where the protective clothing for the fire service is now and where it is going in the future. At the end of this segment, the students are each outfitted with the coats, boots, gloves and helmets that they will use for the remainder of the day.
The next segment is an introduction to the use and need for SCBA in the fire service. There is an explanation of the toxic byproducts of fire and demonstrations of the proper methods for donning and wearing SCBA.
Students are then given SCBA to practice donning and wearing. With full protective clothing and SCBA, the students immediately become aware of the limitations fire fighting gear impose on fire fighters.
From this point, the students move outside for hands-on training. They are exposed to the three most common hose lines: 1½, 1¾ and 2½-inch lines. Students actually operate charged hoses to experience the feel of lines. Initially the students are awkward, but once they develop confidence, they get a better understanding of the difficulty in handling hose lines in confined spaces and the value of standpipes in areas where normal hose stretches pose a problem.
Now familiarized with hose lines and SCBA and outfitted with full protective clothing, the students move into the tower/smoke house where they experience the culmination of the day’s training, an actual class A fire. In a very structured demonstration, the students are exposed to a fire started with hay in cardboard boxes built up in one corner of the tower. The students are in two groups, one wearing SCBA and the other group seated close to the exit without SCBA. After the fire is ignited, the instructor explains the stages of fire, mushrooming, and the phenomenon of thermal balance. As the smoke increases, the students without SCBA begin to briefly experience the discomforting effects of smoke and are escorted from the building.
The remaining students, fully protected, experience a situation with which only fire victims and fire fighters are acquainted — the effects of fires on an enclosed structure. Students quickly become aware of the obscuration of vision, the increased heat and the fire’s smoldering due to4he decrease of oxygen.
The students are then led to the floor above the fire to see how the smoke and heat rise in a structure. As the roof scuttle is opened, they can easily see the effects of vertical ventilation and what an aid it is to structural fire fighting. This has a profound effect on the IRI trainees, since IRI advocates automatic smoke and heat venting features in many of the facilities which it insures.
Students are then given a charged 1½-inch hose line and shown the dramatic effect of what happens when the thermal balance is upset. After this, they are shown how to ventilate the fire floor using the fog nozzle. Of course, students also experience overhaul and cleanup operations.
This same scenario is generally repeated two or three times during each session to give all students the opportunity to participate in each activity and to see fire as few civilians get to see it.
The class A fire session is always well received by IRI engineers. Because the IRI students have experienced in a small way what a fire fighter has to contend with every day, the session broadens their views of fire fighters and enables them to relate better to fire fighters and plant personnel with fire fighting experience. As one student stated, “We so often have to make recommendations about fire protection and now we have a better understanding of the true problems involved in fire suppression.”
A special class held last April for non-IRI people had an international group from all – corners of the world including New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Scotland and the United Kingdom.
In return for this training, the Wallingford Fire Department has sent numerous fire fighters and fire officers to the IRI course. Wallingford Fire Chief lack McElfish says, “The lab is one of the finest in the world. It allows fire fighters the opportunity to see and learn about one of the most complete collections of fire protection equipment that exists.” This exposure to see firsthand how fixed fire protection equipment functions and to understand the basics of its inspection and maintenance has also helped fire fighters to round out their own fire protection backgrounds.
Reciprocal programs such as this can not only strengthen the ties between the public and private sectors but can also maximize the training efforts of each while minimizing expenses.
Today’s world demands more of the fire protection professional than ever before, while today’s economy dictates that extra dollars for additional training be held to a minimum. Through cooperative programs such as this, professional development need not be sacrificed to maintain the existing levels of training expenditures.
Lieutenant Michael Callan and Larry Davis are also instructors at the Connecticut State Fire School.
